“A case of this latter sort was the one of a negro and his wife, who had given their owner a severe beating. In spite of the fact that the first cause of the trouble was the rejection by the woman of the master’s advances, the offence was so flagrant that neighboring slave-owners feared to let it go by without severe and public punishment. At the time set the slaves from neighboring plantations were gathered, and the man and woman fastened to posts near each other. The man was to receive a hundred and fifty lashes and the woman a hundred. As the first strokes fell on the man’s back and loins he gave no sound, but the agony betrayed itself in the ashening of his dark skin, and in the involuntary contortion of his features. Meanwhile the woman encouraged him with crude expressions of pity and love. As the blows increased in number the torture became unbearable, and the sound of the regularly landing lash was punctuated with the shrieks of its agonized victim. Finally a blessed unconsciousness came to his relief, and he hung from the post a limp, unfeeling mass of bruised and bleeding flesh. While his back was being washed, the whipping of the woman began. The first blows brought shrieks of anguish from her lips, but as the whipping went on these subsided into a murmur of sobs, prayers, and appeals for mercy. With the exception of an occasional rest for the tired arm of the man wielding the whip, her punishment was carried to its end without her losing consciousness, although it was apparent that there had come some numbing influence to her faculties closely akin to insensibility. The man had now been restored to his senses and his punishment was resumed. When it was finished the wounds of both were washed with salt water, to intensify the effect of the blows, to prevent blood-poisoning and to heal the wounds more quickly, so that the slaves could resume their accustomed labor. This matter of the slave’s ability to work was always taken into account, and we have one instance of two economical lady slave-owners in Georgia who always inflicted their punishments Sunday mornings, so that by Monday the slaves would be able to go into the fields.”